By Rowan Willow
Wild Rivers
September 18, 2018
All work and no play makes the earth very, very sad. You need to play with the earth with your hands and you need to play with concepts with your mind. Play doesn’t mean you have to understand. You don’t have to understand why that branch is broken in the way it is, or why it curves like that or even which organism it comes from. You don’t have to understand how or why or if divination works to toy around with the idea.
For the tenth annual NeoRio festival in Wild Rivers, I created a toy like those doctor’s office toys kids play with where they bat around blocks with shapes and numbers attached to some sort of metal rod which allows for limited movement of the object. I lovingly (and very incorrectly) referred to it as my metaphysical abacus. I gathered objects from the environment (mostly sticks and pinecones, with a few logs and a single feather), drilled holes through them, and strung them up between two trees. There were seven levels, going from the ground to above your head. On the bottom I painted concrete concepts, like shapes and letters, and gradually as you went up the levels the concepts I painted on the objects got more complex. It went through insects to animals, to ideas attached to the earth, to very human ideas, to heavenly ones. The idea was there were concepts appropriate for all age ranges, so everyone could play!
I wanted to get people back to their roots of childhood wonder, but I also wanted a multigenerational family friendly environment. During the festival, I was very happy to see every age range play with it, both very young and very old.
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